Imprints of Devotion: Print and the Passion in the Iberian World (1472-1598)

Abstract

“Imprints of Devotion: Print and the Passion in the Iberian World (1472-1598)” takes a comparative approach to demonstrate that the printed books at the center of its chapters –La dolorosa passio del nostre redemptor Jesucrist (Barcelona: Pere Posa, 1508), Le premier livre de Amadis de Gaule (Paris: Denis Janot, 1540), and a Latin translation of the Brevísima relación de la destruyción de las Indias (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1598)– possess shared material elements that either evoke or intentionally depart from typographical conventions that characterize a corpus of late fifteenth-century Iberian devotional literature related to Christ’s Passion. Rather than dismiss such repetitions as arbitrary, I propose they are instances of material intertextuality. In this dissertation, material intertextuality accounts for previous reading, viewing, emotive, and recitative experiences related to Christ’s Passion that readers recalled while interacting with early printed books. The use and reuse of materials, decorative elements, and literary content not only within the same volume, but also across printed books, religious art, and liturgy activated memories of such experiences for readers. Reading these texts through material intertextuality reveals the networks of printers and readers who produced and consumed them. While religious practices such as devotion to a human, suffering Christ arrived later to Iberia compared to other European areas, Iberia sought and maintained vibrant connections to Europe through the cultivation of the printing industry. This dissertation employs case studies of three printed books to recover Iberian imprints’ influential role in the broader European book trade and to highlight occasions when printed books from the Iberian world prompted innovation and creativity on the part of printers in other parts of Europe. As the dissertation moves across generic, linguistic, and geographic boundaries that were more fluid in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it brings a previously-separated corpus of printed books back into dialogue by means of their material intertexts. In so doing, “Imprints of Devotion” provides an interdisciplinary position from which to examine late medieval and early modern literature as artifacts that teach us about their creators and users.